The part of california I miss most is the sun. Cloudless days sitting outside eating burgers from one of Los Angeles’ 5.4 million burger establishments (“In & Out”:http://www.in-n-out.com/ being the king of them all), or lounging in patio chairs reading “Naked”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316777730/qid=1054753648/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-1553183-5701666?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 and wondering if that girl by the pool should be out in the sun with so much saline on her chest, or just admiring the city’s streets from the window of our rented car.

*The sun was always out.*

Big, beautiful, and hot. This could cause a problem eventually, while in LA the valley hit temperatures of 106 degrees and it’s only spring. The thought of summer in LA makes my stomach turn, but I’m a pasty white boy from New York, I need all the sun I can get.

The moral of this story is basically, in New York it has been raining for 2 months. Everybody in New York is tired of the rain. It drains the life out of you, slowly destroying your self esteem. I need some sun damn it. Sun.

*Please stop the rain.*

You can’t live in LA by normal people rules, because people in LA don’t live by the same rules that we live by. Here, it’s all about the “industry.” People in LA, as far as I can tell, have a truly perverted view of the world. The world they live in is the world that I as a New Yorker, don’t buy into. I don’t watch television. I think the majority of the movies from Hollywood suck. I find that most of popular culture is not charming, but rather a plague which is successfully draining this country of both intelligence and ambition.

Brittany Spears is an embarrassment.

People here are obsessed with popular culture. They eat it up, in all it’s vulgarity, and recite television show trivia like gospel. It is a huge city, which much like it’s citizens, is forever looking at itself and completely misses what is happening in the world around them. I asked the question “what if you don’t have a television in LA?” to a party of people, to which I was greeted with the most frightened faces I had seen all vacation.

“Why would you want to do that?”

LA is also a fantastic city to watch, like a car wreck is fun to watch. The people here are caricatures of themselves in many ways, like there’s the Indy people with the retro mesh-hats, or the punks with their Misfits shirts and bullet holding belts, or the people walking down Melrose in full club outfits on a Sunday morning. It really is a great place for people watching. There are the standard truths about LA, like everybody drives, everybody wants to be famous, and most people are not walking around with their original cheeks. After a few days here it all started to make sense.

All in all, Los Angeles is a fantastic city to be in, because it has it’s own personality. It isn’t trying to be anything it’s not. LA is a vapid, self-indulgent, hedonistic, energetic, and often hypercritic city, just like New York. It is what it is.

*I am a fan.*

*Just because.*

Back in New York we have this Dairy product called _Skim Milk_. It is part of a four pronged system of milk delivery. They consist of:

* Whole Milk
* 2% Milk
* 1% Milk
* Skim Milk

(There is also Half- &-Half as well as the popular cream varieties, but for the sake of this argument we shall leave them out.)

But these different categories of milk, apparently, haven’t reached this coast yet and it troubles me. Yesterday, we went to the local Coffee vending establishment and Diane asked for an iced coffee with skim, to which the uncomfortable girl behind the counter said;

“What?”
“Skim.”
“What’s Skim?”
“Skim Milk?”
“What? Low fat?”
“Yes, Low fat milk.”

But skim milk isn’t low fat milk, it’s no-fat milk, but the idea of prolonging the conversation with the recent college grad was too daunting for either of us and we quickly retreated, leaving the foolish girl to her milk mislabeling ways. It’s a frightening world out here in California.

*Frightening.*

Well, the flight was unremarkable, we didn’t crash and Florence Henderson didn’t speak jive… Which I am thankful for. We flew on JetBlue, which was great and arrived in Oakland right on time. Diane’s friend Toni picked us up at the airport, again right on time and we drove to her apartment in sunny _Walnut Creek_ California.

Sounds perfect right?

That’s just the problem! Maybe it’s the New Yorker in me trying to find faults in everything, or perhaps the cynical Metropolitan who can’t trust in the kindness of strangers, or even perhaps that I may be a complete asshole and need to return to my therapist, but everything here seems a little too perfect. Not a cloud in the sky; not a chance of drizzle; not a frown in site. Everybody’s happy, affluent, and white.

Even the mosquitoes are picky about who they bite.

It’s kind of like when you visit the zoo and you see the lemmings in their “natural environment” and everything looks kosher, but something about it just seems a little bit off. It might be the cracking paint, or the dead trees with plastic leaves, or the outline of the door in the far off mountain ranges. I feel like the lemming. A lemming in the wrong display.

I’m expecting a handler to give me a banana at any moment.

I will report back at my next base camp and tell yall where I’m at in my anthropological studies of the West Coast. So for now, Funtime Ben signing off.